The electorate of Grey has covered the bulk of South Australia’s land mass since the state was first divided into electorates in 1903, and it currently encompasses much the same territory as it did on its creation. The state’s eastern regions north of the Riverland were at times accommodated by Wakefield, but Grey has at all times accommodated the state’s west together with the iron triangle cities of Whyalla, Port Augusta and Port Pirie. Labor-voting Whyalla is the electorate’s largest centre with a population of around 22,000, while increasingly marginal Port Augusta and Port Pirie together with strongly conservative Port Lincoln on the lower Eyre Peninsula each have populations of slightly over 13,000. About 60 per cent of the electorate’s population is scattered through the remainder, the strongest concentration being in the rural conservative Yorke Peninsula. The latter area was added to the electorate from Wakefield when South Australia’s representation was reduced from 12 seats to 11 in 2004.

Grey’s industrial centres once made it a reliable seat for Labor, but their decline over recent decades has effected a decisive shift to the Liberals. Labor held the seat for all but one term between 1943 and 1993, the exception being after the landslide defeat of 1966. Laurie Wallis recovered the seat for Labor in 1969 and retained it by margins of 563 votes in 1975 and 65 votes in 1977, surviving on the latter occasion in the face of an unfavourable redistribution, and bequeathed the seat to Lloyd O’Neil in 1983. The turning point arrived in 1993, when the addition of the Clare Valley (since transferred to Wakefield) and the retirement of O’Neil opened the way for Barry Wakelin to win the seat for the Liberals on the back of a 4.3% swing. The Liberals’ position has been strengthening ever since, helping Wakelin to achieve swings of 6.4% in 1996, 1.9% in 2001 and 3.2% in 2004, with a correction of only 0.5% to Labor in 1998. Wakelin’s retirement in 2007 combined with the overall swing to Labor cut the margin that year from 13.8% to 4.4%, but the Liberal ascendancy has since been firmly re-established by successive swings of 6.7% and 2.4% in 2010 and 2013. The member since 2007 has been Rowan Ramsey, who runs a farming property at Buckleboo on the Eyre Peninsula.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.
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1,234 comments on “Seat of the week: Grey”

But does Crikey seriously believe its readers even need a lame “report card” on Abbott’s political skills from a self-appointent savant in Canberra? Does Crikey really believe its audience cannot make its own assessment on how well Abbott has done this year? They know the election results. They know how their lives are travelling since the result, for better or worse.

Why does Keane resort to this lame analysis crap that the press gallery spew out and any old fool can and does do?

I’d be more interested in Keane’s views on the actual outlook for 2014 and what might be the economic and societal challenges on the horizon and how the government and opposition might skillfully respond to those. Or better yet, some anaylsis on policies and implementation challenges in a tighter budgetary environments?

But no, we just get smart-guy-at-the-uni-pub telling us who has “won” the week and how he is so clever that he can put his dislike of a politician aside to “anaylse and respect his skills”.

The Senate will become more complicated from July because Abbott will have to heard enough crossbenchers to get bills past on anything the ALP and Greens oppose and the post-2010 election period shows that Abbott is not the best negotiator. Palmer will want a disproportionately large slice of decision-making for his votes and there will be the DLP, FF, LibDem Senators and Senator Xenophon to also get the vote of all but one or two (WA Senate rerun may increase the ALP and Green representation by 1) of.

Morgan’s sidebar has a new poll result with Labor ahead 52.5-47.5, Kevin Bonham has tweeted primary votes, but I can’t see any info on it on the Morgan site. The sample is nearly 3000, suggesting they’ve changed methodology on us again.

Abbott as a skilled politician?
-the comatose interview on Ch. 7 re ‘shit happens’
-the death stares after being exposed by Lisa Williamson [?], Leigh Sales and BHP, O’Brien and ‘it ain’t true unless its written’, on 4 Corners after the belated discovery of the black hole
-run rabbott run in parliament [and then begging Thomson for his vote]
-and from press interviews
–
-fluro pointless stunts around the country duly put on teev, mistaking motion for action
-Margy and the girls fiasco
-suppository
-making stuff up and being allowed to get away with it
-as Tony Jones said to some COALition person [I forget who. maybe someone here has the memory for the detail] “It must help to have Rupert Murdoch on your side”
-and Gina and the ABC
-all supporting his blatant long term misogyny

eveyAus ‏@eveyaus 9h
@randlight @smh I’m stuck at that point, can’t make a happy ending where @MargaretAbbot10 and him drive off in a BMW to live happily E after
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8:22 AM – 16 Dec 13 · Details
Margie Abbott ‏@MargaretAbbot10 1m
.@eveyaus @randlight @smh it would be a much happier ending if he went off alone. Just saying.

[Just remember: acknowledging somebody’s political skills does not necessarily mean you actually think they’re doing a good job governing.]

The Thousand Faces Of Tony Abbott were actually 998 until he was sworn in. Now we have “Prime Minister” and “Statesman” to add to the check list that starts with “Boofhead” and “Wall-puncher”.

Surely there can’t be any more to come. Abbott would have to be one of the best known politicians in the country, even in Australian political history.

Is there anything he hasn’t tried?

OK, so he was a good LOTO, getting rid of Rudd first, then Gillard, then Rudd again. Score 10/10 for being a wrecker and running destructive interference.

Along the way he got Pauline Hansen jailed, dudded Peter Reith, betrayed Malcolm Turnbull and – arguably his greatest triumph – scammed the Australian public into thinking he was dumb con man they could easily outwit and manipulate for their own purposes.

The internet and the newspapers are full of journalists and commentators who thought that – no matter what else Abbott discarded or reneged upon – their pet project would go ahead, because no-one could be so stupid as to, say, ditch the NBN, go back on a “Unity Ticket” promise, claw back wages and salaries from the nation’s lowest paid workers, withdraw funds from indigenous education foundations, sack the Salvation Army from humanitarian work, insult the Indonesian President (an ongoing hobby of his), actually persist with his crazy Direct Action plan, kill off the Maritime National Parks, de-list the Tasmanian protected areas, abandon the Murray-Darling wetlands, get rid of General Motors before his own productivity Commission hearings had even finished taking evidence, tell Toyota to piss off without a Productivity Commission hearing, stop trades training centers, dredge the Great Barrier Reef, de-fund the Pacific highway infrastructure works, or only appoint one woman to his cabinet (when he was so obviously pro-women, being clearly fond of his daughters and in love with his wife, and they of him).

All the men and women who supported the above issues and voted for Abbott believing he wouldn’t – couldn’t – be so stupid as to abandon their hopes and dreams for their pet projects, did so because they equally couldn’t believe he’d have the effrontery to look straight into the camera’s eye on Day #100 and say he was pleased to have been able to keep every one of his election promises and to have run an ordered, professional government that brought hope for all Australians back onto the agenda.

The low-wage forkie from Western Sydney (on ABC TV news a few months back, before the election) summed up all their thoughts on the matter by saying, on air, “Hey, we can always vote him out in three years. What harm can he do in the meantime?”

“How much harm can he do in three months?” is a better question, and appropriate for Day #100.

Abbott told us all that what we thought we voted for was a completely different thing to what he thought we voted for. And, he told us, what he thought we voted for was what counted. It didn’t bear much relation to our own views on these matters.

And that’s where the last two Faces Of Abbott come in – PM and statesman.

The polls tell us that, in the considered opinion of the public, as tabulated by Bludger Track, that maybe if they’d known then what they know now, they mightn’t have voted for him. The indications are that all the people, and then some, who left Labor after 2010 and defected to the Abbott Circus, have come back.

So when you weigh up the evidence and consider the Thousand Faces If Tony Abbott, you have to think that the last two – PM and Statesman – haven’t stood him in good stead, and that the Australian public’s opinion is trending towards them thinking Tony Abbott, as a politician, has finally reached his Peter Principle-type level of incompetence.

In short, he’s a great wrecker, but a lousy builder, because he’s too big a hater.

So why not call him on it as he walks off? Ask him what he has to hide.

I seem to recall a former PM, can’t remember who, refusing to turn up for a Kerry O’Brien (I think) grilling and the empty chair being given prominence during the show. Said PM was never a non show after that.